The Orator Giovan Pietro Maffeis (?)

The sitter is probably Giovan Pietro Maffeis, and the museum keeps a question mark after his name. If it is him, Moroni painted a man from his own Bergamo, born in 1533, who had taught rhetoric in Genoa and in 1564 became secretary to the Genoese Republic. In 1565, within the years this portrait is dated to, Maffeis gave all that up, went to Rome and joined the Jesuits, then an order only 25 years old. He went on to teach rhetoric at their college in Rome and later wrote a Latin history of the Portuguese in the Indies. Here he is still a layman in black, a folded letter in his hand, against pilasters of bare brick. The canvas has a journey of its own. In 1636 it belonged to the Venetian collector Bartolomeo della Nave, two years later it was bought for the Scottish Marquess of Hamilton, and after Hamilton was beheaded in 1649 it passed to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria.